Your Public Profile

June 2, 2010

Beau Lebens

Back in March when we announced Gravatar-powered profiles on WordPress.com, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you’ve had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let’s open things up. It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it’s time to do what we’ve been really excited to do since we first announced profiles:

As of right now, your profile page on Gravatar.com is open to public linking!

People have been emailing us, asking when they could start linking to this new, centralized identity point. The answer is “now.” You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself.

We’re really looking forward to seeing what people do with their profiles, and we’ve made a few additional changes so that they are even more useful:

foursquare and TripIt have been added to the list of accounts you can confirm via Gravatar (let us know in the comments if there are specific services you’d like to see supported)

You’re no longer limited to 140 characters when writing your bio, so go nuts and tell everyone your life story!

Custom Backgrounds! Upload any image (via the Gravatar profile editor) or pick any color and set it as the background for your public profile page. Here’s mine with some freshly-cut grass:

As always, if you’d prefer that your information was kept private, then please just go your profile either here on WordPress.com or over on Gravatar.com to remove those details. People will then only be able to see your Gravatar image, just like before. We’re working on some really cool new things around profiles, and will get them out the door as soon as they’re available!

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hum? this seems a bit like wordpress is doing a facebook privacy turnaround…. now everyones profile is public…. this should be opt-in not opt-out, i don’t want my avatars to be public, and i didn’t signed up for gravatar for this, im disappointed -_-

I think there’s a slight misunderstanding: everything in your Gravatar has always been completely open, that’s why so many websites are able to create cool integrations on top of Gravatar’s systems. Your avatar has always been open, that’s why it shows up here! Anything you don’t want to be open, please remove it from your account. That’s why we gave everyone a few months to try out the feature.

Yes, very nice. I’ve had my profile out there, properly tailored for quite awhile. Just one thing, though. In my case, unless you’re talking about an image *combined* with a background, I’ll be danged if I can find a place to upload a separate background or color for my gravatar (separate from the theme for the blog, for which I’m using sandbox…) Eh?

Faintly bothered that you’ve made profiles public by default with no way (that I can see) of fully hiding/disabling them. If I’m wrong, could you please let people know how to turn their profiles off? Thanks.

Howdy — Gravatar has always been 100% open. If you don’t want it to be open, don’t put it in your profile. We’ve said that’s how it is, prominently, ever since the profiles feature launched a few months ago.

This is terrific, I have already updated my profile..
A few things..
a) Where and how will the profile show to the readers?
b) Is there any possibility of drag drop the images (the right side filmstrip) so the Order could be sequences..
c) Background choice is wonderful.. since its Gravatar based, could the text color be done something about..
****These are not suggestions just a few things that popped in my mind..****
Ever since I started blogging- which was only on 28th March this year, WP.com updates have been storming across…
I am so happy..
Thankyou WP
Cheers..!!

a) Right now, it will only be shown to users if you explicitly link to your page on http://gravatar.com. We’re going to be adding some tools to make it easier to link up your profile (and the information contained therein) in the near future.

b) You’re not the first to ask about this, and we’re looking at making it so that you can re-order images, links and services more easily

c) Do you mean having the ability to change font/link colors on your profile a la Twitter? Also something we’re looking at, but we wanted to see how much people used the customization features before overwhelming them with choices 😉

Looks nice … and if you want more customization options, it would be awesome to get to set Typekit or Google Webfonts for your profile page. Also, would it be possible to make your email address hidden with reCapatcha’s Mailhide?

You can remove everything from your account, but there are some difficulties around deletions because, as you note, your account is tied to a lot of different things. Most places who give you a delete button don’t actually delete your data, they just archive it, it’s just a deletion placebo. If/when we launch the feature, I’d like for it to be in a way that things are actually gone.

http://en.gravatar.com/dalinseivewright
At least on my end, because my WordPress link is fairly long, the Verified Services list doesn’t expand so the link gets partially covered by my gravatar. Could you add some more control over what gets shown? I would rather have a smaller image than a blown up one… even the ability align the main image to the right would be nice.

Also: The ability to remove certain sections to make space would be cool (I for one won’t be using the Photo Section at all so making it disapear allowing the main gravatar to float to the right would be cool.)

The question I want an answer to is – how can you partner with a service that has got this to say about deleting a profile:

“I’m sorry, we currently don’t delete accounts. If you remove all the images from your account, however, this simulates your account being deleted as far as the outside world is concerned.”

I would have at least expected wp to be very clear about this particular point because then I would have never filled in any details or actually, I might have chosen a different blogging platform to begin with as it’s really important to me that I get to decide how visible I am and who has my email address (no matter if it is publically displayed or not). I’m really not happy about this At ALL. After the reblogging thing which is also a transgression of my freedom to decide what I want to share how, this takes the cake.

Gravatar is a standalone service (apart from WordPress), so you can definitely maintain your Gravatar Profile over at http://gravatar.com. We will be releasing some plugins etc that make it integrate better with WordPress in the future for people who want to use it as their primary profile manager.

Ack! I don’t want my Gravatar page public automatically. Why is WordPress automatically linked to Gravatar, and why must it be public, and how do you set it back to private? I want my blog, without the Gravatar.

When the gravatar powered profiles was announced I was happy to be able to use it for a couple of links. Now, thanks so much for the chance to take it to the next level as you describe. Keeping up with wordpress is quite an ambition!! mwaa!!

There’s a section in the “edit my profile” bit to add links, but after adding one I discovered that it doesn’t actually appear anywhere on my profile. If it’s not going to show up what’s the point of adding it?

I like WordPress.com as a blogging platform, but its increasing emphasis on making a social network out of its bloggers is beginning to bother me. Suddenly I have a public profile that I only just now noticed. And now people can “reblog” or plagiarize content without my opting into such a system, as if WordPress.com had confused itself with twitter.

MySpace is available as one of the Verified Services, just select it from the list and click “Verify through Gravatar…”. Once you’ve verified your account, it will show up on your profile. You can also just add it as a Link if you prefer (unverified), by entering your MySpace address.

How do my readers find my profile from my blog? I’ve searched endlessly and viewed countless other WP blogs and can find NOTHING! Am I lost or am I lost? I don’t want to bother continuing with this Gravatar business if you can’t even get to my profile from my blog.

We’ll be releasing some widgets and other ways for you to more easily link to your profile (if you’d like to), but you can also just use the current Gravatar widget (Appearance > Widgets) and then add a link to your image that goes directly to your profile on Gravatar if you like.

I’m confused – when I look at “My Profile” in WordPress – is it automatically equal to / dumped into or something with Gravatar? in other words, can I create My Profile on WordPress WITHOUT being stuck into this hugely widely public Gravatar thing? For now – as I am just getting started and learning on WP – I don’t mind a profile which is viewable strictly within my blog site or WordPress.com, but I do not want to get involved in more than that.

WordPress.com profiles are powered by Gravatar, which is a completely open system. If you don’t want any of your details to be available via Gravatar, then please don’t enter them in your WordPress.com profile either (as they’re the same thing).

Intergrating your profile with public view is a great relationship builder. It is a known fact that people are attracted to the power of the photo. It’s easy to become comfortable with a person, place or thing just by seeing it. Even if you never talk to a person, just their photo can give you the sence of norm. Great job guys. From: JPgroup20